


The Mysteries of Marcie Fleach: Chapter 6-The Laundromat of Doom

by Sketchpad



Series: The Mysteries Of Marcie Fleach [6]
Category: Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated (TV 2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-04-19 11:31:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 18,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4744706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sketchpad/pseuds/Sketchpad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone is stealing washing machines all over town. Why? Can Marcie and the gang find the culprit and make him clean up his act?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

 

Barney Ackerman, owner of  _Ackerman's Appliances_ , closed the door to his office. It was ten minutes until closing and he was tired. Bone tired. A busy day of searching for lost invoices and precious receipts, dealing with ungrateful workers' complaints and even more unsatisfied customers' petty whining, had him drained and made him more than a little surly.

The store was dark for the most part, except for the hallway leading to the product warehouse and the rear entrance, and that was where Barney would normally pass through on his way out of his place of business. He always felt it was more secure. That belief would be shattered tonight.

His mind was preoccupied with thoughts of the new line of Cleanco wares that he ordered last month. Shiny new washing machines guaranteed to take the customers' tiny little minds off the questionably functional devices he had sold them, so far, that he had bought cheap and had repaired just enough to work for a few months, before the inevitable break-downs occurred, prompting them to come to his doorstep to buy, yet again.

He always told them some lie, like, "It's because they were made overseas," or "If American companies thought about the consumer, instead of their own pockets, they wouldn't outsource washing machines from somewhere else," and so and so on.

He couldn't have cared less about the state of American craftsmanship or about using them as a convenient scapegoat for his own duplicity, so long as there were people desperate to keep their laundry clean and needed a washing machine,  _any_  washing machine, to do it.

That kind of gullibility gave him a warm feeling as he walked through the warehouse. It told him that the greedy god of capitalism was in his avaricious heaven, and all was right in this dog-eat-dog world.

He reached the reinforced rear door, inputted his code into the security keypad nearby, and opened the door. There, he saw the oddest thing past the threshold.

A floating robot, large, angular and as white as a snowdrift, stared him down with impassive red optics. It quietly and slowly flew inside the warehouse, flanked by two more.

Barney choked on a scream and fearfully back away from it.

The machines opened their formation into something of a search pattern, their domed heads swiveling, silently seeking,. Each took a chosen path and glided deep into the warehouse, sidling up to cardboard boxes and crates and scanning their displayed bar codes.

Although Barney was thankful that the robots didn't attack him, or even acknowledge his presence, he hated being in a position of weakness or not knowing what was going on. He knew that, somehow, he had to take some control of the situation.

Barney walked up to the nearest robot as quietly as his courage would allow and tapped it on its armored back.

"Hey, pal," he told it. "What are you doing here? This is my warehouse, and if I don't get any answers, someone's gonna be sorry."

The robot ignored him.

Despite the situation he found himself in, Barney hated being ignored even more than not being in control.

"Hey!" he yelled, tapping harder on the back of the robot's white, waste paper basket-shaped body. "I'm talkin' to you!"

The robot stopped its bar code reading and smoothly swung around to regard this vexing human, while Barney was satisfied that it was finally paying attention to him.

"That's better. Now what are you and your pals doing in my store?" he asked.

If the robot was going to respond to the question, Barney never heard it. One moment, there was a face off between man and machine, and the next, there was a loud beeping coming from further in the warehouse, in the general direction where one of the other robots had gone.

Barney's interrogation was cut short as the robot that faced him turned around and accelerated into the gloomy depths of the storage area.

"Hey, wait!" he told it, following the robot through the canyons of boxes.

Both he and the machine arrived in time to see the other two robots tearing into large cardboard boxes with heavy pincers attached to spindly, yet deceptively strong arms adorned with strange medallions on their shoulders.

"Hey, what are you doing? Stop!" Barney cried, wanting to step in and take charge, yet thanks to his well-developed sense of self-preservation, thought better of it.

He turned to the robot that he followed. "Hey! You better tell you friends to stop, or I'll take a blowtorch to the lot of ya!"

His dubious threat was answered with that robot moving ahead and joining his brethren in ripping the boxes open, their wrapping and packing material flying in every cardinal direction.

Barney had no idea why these overgrown science toys were ripping through his products' packaging like manic kids on a Christmas morning, but, impossibly, he feared for something far more than his own life. His bottom line, which, in his eyes, was in dire jeopardy.

Summoning what little courage he had in him, Barney, with fists raised, gave a squeak of a battle cry and leaped at the devices. Whereby, he was promptly snatched up in mid-charge by the robot closest to him, its unwavering pincer holding the foolish organic up for it to see, unfeeling optic to terrified eye.

It re-balanced its hardy gyroscopics to compensate for the human's weight, raised its arm, and tossed Barney to the cold floor like an old coat. He landed hard on his stomach, knocking the wind out of him on impact.

Barney barely had strength to lift himself off of his aching belly and turn his head to the sound of profit being lost in the machines' destructive acts.

"Hey..." he managed to croak at them, before the robot who manhandled him took a break from opening more of that group of boxes, and floated over to him.

Barney couldn't see the barrel extending from the center of the opened pincer that pointed down at him from behind, couldn't react to the sound of a laser pulse generator warming up from within.

All he heard before the night brutally ended for him, was the tinny, halting voice of his automated attacker.

"Hay...is for horses," it said.

Then, it fired, its surprising joke punchlined that night by a human wail of agony.

* * *

Marcie strolled through the promenade of the Crystal Cove Mall. Normally, the lights, sound and motion of the place would draw her in with thoughts of rampant consumerism. At the moment, however, her mind was on killing the dull ache between her temples that accompanied her all day.

"Ugh," Marcie moaned to any friend within earshot. "I knew I should've took something for this headache before I left home."

Red Herring, walking along with Daisy Blake and Jason Wyatt, asked slyly. "I didn't know nerds could party that hard."

"We can when we put our minds to it," Marcie said. "But that's not what happened. Not really. My dad and I had dinner with some businessman who's been wanting to buy Dad's amusement park. Y'know, standard business thing. Make an offer, shoot it down, negotiate, shoot _that_ down. That sort of thing. Strangest thing, though. I don't remember coming back home. We just woke up in our bedrooms. I guess Mr. Greenman had his servants bring us back in his limo."

"That  _is_  weird. You should've call me, Marcie," Daisy said. "I could've brought you back, and in a better car, too."

"Next time, I promise," Marcie told her. "Right now, I have to find an appliance store so I can avert a major crisis."

"What kind of crisis?" Jason asked her, warily. "I want to understand what's going to happen so I can safely avoid it."

Marcie sighed at the cowardice. "Nothing so earth-shattering, Jellyfish. I just have to help my dad look for a new washing machine. Ours is on the fritz."

Jason shrugged. "Oh. Why call it a crisis, then?"

Marcie frowned as a memory reacquainted with her. "You know the nickname people called me growing up. Hot Dog Water," she reminded him. "Because my dad was too cheap to have our hot water heater replaced when it broke down, so I had to bathe in the water from his hot dog concession stand when I was a little girl. That was just my  _body_. What if I have to wash my clothes in that stuff, too? Oh, no. I've already paid to dear a price for his cheapskate ways. Window shopping can wait."

"Speak for yourself," Daisy chimed in. "I'm rich, but there's always time to window shop. Anyway, I've gotta find the hardware store and pick up some screws. I've got this mad posh to get my arts-and-crafts on."

"Arts and crafts?" Jason asked. "What are you making?"

"Well, I found these really cool glass tabletops in an alley the other day," Daisy told him. "Didn't find any table legs yet, but it's a start."

Red leaned close to Daisy, saying, "By the way, Daisy, the next time you take me dumpster diving with you, let me make sure I've had my shots, first."

"What do you mean, Red?"

"I could've sworn something was in one of those dumpsters with me," he said, favoring his left hand, fretfully. "I think it bit me."

Daisy waved it away. "Oh, Red, don't be a big baby. I've been bitten plenty of times. You'll be fine. It's just the competition trying to get between you and whatever cool stuff's inside."

Red didn't look too convinced of such an outlook. "Ya think so?"

Daisy shrugged. "Sure. At least, that's the way I look at it."

Jason took a glance across the busy promenade and perked up, pointing at a store that caught his attention.

"Hey, Marcie. Is that what you're looking for?" he asked.

Marcie looked across the mall and, indeed, saw an appliance store. However, any thoughts of browsing through it were stilled by the spectacle of Sheriff Stone and Deputy Bucky standing outside the facade getting statements from the store owner while other deputies were coming and going from the store's environs.

Bucky took a casual glance away from his duties and happened to see Marcie and her friends watching the scene from their location. He brightened up and waved at them.

"Hey, Marcie," he called out. "How are you guys today?"

Stone looked over to Bucky. "Who are you talking to, Bucky? We're in the middle of a serious investigation, here."

"I know, Sheriff. I was just saying hi to Marcie, that's all. Certainly didn't think we'd see them here, though."

"This is a mall, Bucky," Stone sighed as he watched with annoyance the teens' approach. "The teenager's natural habitat. Ugh, as if I don't have enough to worry about."

Stone brought his broad hand up to halt the gang when they seemed too close to the crime scene for his liking.

"That's far enough, you guys," he said. "What do you want, Macie?"

"That's Marcie, Sheriff Stone," Marcie corrected him. "And don't worry. I'm not here to step on your obvious size thirteens. I'm just doing some comparative shopping. What happened, anyway?"

"That's none of your beeswax, Missy," Stone huffed.

"Yeah," Bucky chimed in. "It's nothing really, guys. Just another appliance store that got hit."

Marcie reflexively asked. "Another? How many so far?"

"There you go again. Asking questions," Stone groaned. "Isn't there a food court you should be hovering around, Miss Skin and Bones?"

"My weight not withstanding, Sheriff, as a consumer, I'd like to know if there are any stores left in town I can get to before they all look like the aftermath of a Black Friday sale."

"Well," Bucky explained to her. "This store make four, so far. The only things taken were some washing machines, just like all the rest. Weirdest thing, though. The last store owner we heard from said that he was robbed by flying robots. Says one even shot him in the keister with a laser beam. Strange, huh?"

Again, the sheriff sighed at his deputy. "It's obvious that he was just tired from working too long, walked in on the perpetrators going through his inventory, and hallucinated these so-called robots."

"But, Sheriff, why was he admitted to the hospital with a pretty big burn on his rear-end," Bucky countered. "What explains that?"

"Easy," Stone said. "Again, he was probably just tired. He must've been smoking and he just fell on his cigar."

The store owner brought himself into the conversation, slightly irritated that people were talking about his plight as if he weren't there suffering it..

"Well, I don't know if it's flying robots or not," he said, reaching over to grab the handle to his store's security shutters. "All I do know is that somebody got into my store and walked away with some of my merchandise. Until someone gets to the bottom of this, I'm locking up."

With that, he brought down the shutters, which clanged closed to punctuate the point.

"Maybe I can hold on to what's left." Then he left the law officers and young spectators, fuming.

Jason broke the awkward moment with a question. "Who'd want to steal washing machines?"

"It's probably just some protesters who've got their dirty panties in a bunch because the price of detergent went up," Stone said dismissively.

Then he pointed at Marcie and the others. "Now you listen to me. There's only one big, crime-solving brain in this town and it's under my hat."

"It's a wonder it can fit," Marcie muttered with a slight smirk.

Stone ignored the jibe and continued. "Just don't let catch you impeding my investigation with your  _theories_ and  _deductions_. Is that clear?"

The sheriff sniffed at them, derisively, then stomped away from the store.

"Protesters, my eye," Marcie muttered while she pondered to herself.

"So, you're gonna solve this mystery, huh?" Jason asked her, warily.

"I have to," Marcie answered glumly. "The future of my clothes depends on it."

 


	2. Chapter 2

Barney Ackerman, owner of Ackerman's Appliances, and now a patient of Crystal Cove Hospital, tried to squirm himself into a more comfortable position while he hung helplessly in a harnessed framework that spanned over his hospital bed.

He was bone tired from a busy afternoon of trying to salvage his dignity while he was suspended and occasionally swayed, sore bottom-up, for every nurse, doctor and orderly to see. And now having to deal with the arrival of some geeky teenager walking into his room made him more than a little surly.

A feeling Marcie caught almost immediately upon asking questions to him about his attack.

"Sorry you can't lie down right now," she commiserated.

"Oh, no, missy," Ackerman growled. "I like being hung up like an engine gettin' worked on. I put up a fight. Don't think so? I'm businessman. I tried to protect my investments."

"And did so valiantly, Mr. Ackerman," she deadpanned. "As you probably know, sir, other appliance stores were also broken into recently."

Ackerman gave a heavy sigh. "What are you, the  _junior_  police? I already told them and that guy in the white suit what went down that night. Not that they believed me anymore than you probably will."

_'Guy in the white suit?'_ Marcie thought, then focused on her interrogation once more. "The police said that you were attacked by robots."

"That's right," he huffed at her. "Flying robots. I still stand by that, missy."

"Do you see what they stole?"

The thought of how quick his defeat was brought about at the theives' metal hands still rubbed his pride raw. "Hummph! You mean while I was lying helpless? Yeah, I saw what they took. They ripped into my entire shipment of Cleanco washers. They were brand new, too."

The consumer in her replied, "Hmm, good brand."

The salesman in him answered, "You bet it was! I only get the best for my customers. Hey, you looking for a washing machine?"

"Actually, I am. I'm trying to solve this mystery so I can try to get a washing machine for home."

"Going the long way around for a washer, aren't ya? But, hey, at least, you understand! This crime affects everybody, especially everybody trying to make a buck!"

"It certainly affected your  _bottom_  line, Mr. Ackerman."

"Ugh. Forget the jokes, will ya? If you're serious about stopping this thing, make it snappy, huh. I don't want to come back to work and find out I don't have any inventory to move."

"Yes, sir."

Marcie took that as her cue to leave the man in peace. She thanked the store owner and left his hospital room.

As she walked down the corridor, Marcie ruminated on the info she had so far. She knew that she would have to question the other victimized store owners if she was to, at least, find some commonality to work on.

Who was doing this? Why was it being done? And the man in the white suit? That was worth considering.

Occam's Razor forced her to ponder that it could simply be thieves who want to sell the washers for quick cash. If that were so and they were local, it could make tracking them down a little easier.

Upon reaching the elevator, Marcie's thoughts were momentarily sidetracked by the sleazy call of Ackerman from his room.

"Hey, nurse. I'm ready for my tune-up! Beep-beep! Heh, heh!"

With a sigh of exasperation, Marcie entered the elevator car.

* * *

It didn't take long for something to come up. Marcie almost missed it while she was walking through the hospital parking lot, deep in thought.

Her white VW convertible sat where it was supposed to be, but Marcie noticed an ominous addition to the vehicle.

She went to the windshield and pulled out an envelope that was held down under one of the windshield wipers. Puzzled, she opened it.

_'Miss Fleach,_ ' it read.  _'I know that you are seeking answers about the missing washing machines in town. For your own safety, I would suggest that you leave this particular mystery alone. You may not be so lucky this time. Thank you for reading.'_

"Pretty polite for a threatening letter," Marcie muttered. "I wonder which of my enemies sent it." Then a thought struck through her like lightning.

"I have a list of enemies! Bitchin'!" she laughed, incredulously. Then she came back to Earth.

"Okay," she pondered to herself. "It's obvious that I'm getting close to something, here, and that somebody both knows me and is following me. I better tell the guys."

Soon after, she hopped into her car and pulled out of the crowded parking lot. Crowded enough to hide the emergence of a sky blue sedan that innocuously drove from the lot and followed her.

* * *

"I'm glad we can talk here, for a while, guys," Marcie said through the chatter of other patrons as she settled into her spot in the padded booth in Chen's Coffee Internet Café & Tea Shop, a establishment that sat at the very mouth of Crystal Cove's Chinatown.

"Well," Jason explained between slurps of soup. "I figured that we might as well come here, since I have a ton of coupons for this place and I don't want them to go to waste."

"Actually, I wanted to meet in a safe place so we could pow-wow, but I guess economy is important, too," Marcie replied with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

"What's going on?" asked Daisy, putting away her newspaper that she decided that she was only casually scanning, away.

Marcie produced the letter from earlier. "I found this on my car after I questioned the most recent victim of these washing machine thefts. I think it might have something to do with this mysterious 'man in the white suit' I heard him mention."

"Man in the white suit?" Red chuckled to himself. "Sounds like those guys who work in the funny farm."

"I doubt that, Red," Marcie said. "But I wish whoever wrote that note might feel the need to check himself into one. I don't know which of my enemies would want me to stop."

A thought struck Daisy. "Whoa, Marcie! Did you hear yourself? '… _Which of my enemies?_ ' You have a list of enemies!" she told her, excitedly. "That's so cool!"

"I know, right?" Marcie said with a grin.

Deciding that it was time to bring the girls' heads out of these very strange clouds, Jason brought up a point.

"Uh, guys," he said to them. "Maybe it's the same one who gave you those letters when you saved those kidnapped kids."

Marcie thought on that, then said, "Nah. Those letters rhymed. This one didn't."

"Well," Jason reasoned, nervously finishing his soup. "Maybe he was feeling poetic when he did those. The point is that maybe you should listen to that letter and call it a day, Marcie."

"First," Marcie explained. "You can't 'listen' to a letter, you can only read one, and second, I told you that I have to solve this mystery and stop whoever this is from hitting any more stores so I can find a washer before my skinflint father makes my fine washables smell like bratwurst. I can't do that if I'm home watching TV."

"Then let's go see Bucky," Red suggested. "He should know something. He's a deputy cop, or something, right?"

"Hey, that's not a bad idea, Red," Daisy told him, giving him a proud squeeze on one of his large arms. "He would know more than we would about the case."

"Well," he flustered through a half-cocky smile. "Y'know..."

"Sounds like a plan," Marcie considered. Then she pondered for a moment, softly tapping a thin finger against her chin. "Man in the white suit. Why does that sound so familiar?"

A thought suddenly opened a door to her past and Marcie stiffened in its understanding. "I bet I know," she said to Daisy, reaching over the table for her friend's newspaper.

She opened it in the middle, read, then nodding with grim, silent satisfaction.

"What?" Daisy asked, but before she got an answer, she felt Red leave her side and jump out of the booth.

"Hey, where are you going?" asked Jason.

"To solve this mystery, Jellyfish," Red said cockily. "I just saw somebody wearing white across the street, and I bet it's whoever's been following Marcie and leaving that note on the Clue Cruiser to scare us off."

"Why does everybody call me that?" Jason sulked before he squeezed from the booth and followed the rest of the gang, who had followed Red out of the café.

Outside, they saw him strut across the street towards a nearby alley. He stopped and looked back to make sure his friends were watching. Satisfied that they were, he gave a determined look into the dark pathway, and then charged in with a yell.

The rest of the gang were about to dismiss the action as yet another example of Red's typical recklessness, until they heard the unmistakable sound of a fight and tensed up in dismay and concern.

"Red!" they cried in unison, running across the street.

Red's body was tossed out of the alleyway's maw, where he landed a few feet from its mouth, catching his breath.

"What happened?" asked Daisy, moving over to his prone form.

"Chan happened," Marcie said, simply.

Marcie held up the newspaper for the rest of her friends to see. Opened, it displayed, in its Entertainment section, the advertisement announcing that the musical group The Chan Clan was playing through Crystal Cove on its Number One Son Tour.

"Indeed, Miss Fleach," came the calmly modulated Asian voice, one that bespoke of years of deductive logic and wisdom. "It would appear that sometimes the young are as hard of hearing as the old."

Red, recovering from the tumble, turned around to look at the Chinese man in the crisp, white suit.

"Hey, how did you get the jump on me?" he asked groggily. "I had you dead to rights."

"Aikido, Mr. Herring," the man answered smoothly, as he left his hiding spot. "The best way to catch an elephant is to let him trip over his own feet."

"Hey, I've heard of you," Jason perked up. "You're that detective. Charlie Chan!"

"I am," the man said, giving a slight bow.

"Well, I don't need the martial arts lesson. I've heard your warning loud and clear, Mr. Chan," Marcie said, irritably. "'I may not be so lucky, this time?' If I hadn't been  _so lucky_ the last time, your kids wouldn't be rocking out on tour, would they?"

"That is true, however, they would not be pleased to see you in danger, Miss Fleach," countered Chan. "Nor would I."

Somehow, Marcie could see the calm earnestness of the man's words through her slighted feelings and sighed in mild capitulation. "Look, I know that you're looking out for me, since you're obviously here in town, but this is different than what happened in Macau."

"So you say, Miss Fleach, but my evidence say otherwise."

"And what does your evidence tell you?"

"Things that I cannot tell you," he said. "For your own safety."

"Well, we'll be getting some info from the police, in a while," Marcie countered back. "So if you don't want to help me, that's quite all right by me."

"Sometimes, Miss Fleach, hindering a friend is the best way to help." Chan said solemnly before he bowed again, tipping his white pork pie hat to her. "I must go. Please take what I have said to heart and do not pursue this matter any further." Then he departed.

As they quietly watched the man walk down the street, Marcie muttered, "He doesn't understand."

"Yeah, it's not like he had years of experience in this kind of thing and you haven't," Jason gibed as his way of dissuading her from her course of action. "You  _have_  to do this. For the sake of your  _clothes_."

"Whatever," Marcie scoffed at his sarcastic warning. "I started this and I'm gonna see it through. At least  _I_  believe that I can do it."

"We do, too," Daisy said, giving Marcie a cheering hug. "But before we defend people's right to fresh laundry, and all of that, can we swing by my house for a sec? I've gotta show everybody something."

"Alright," Marcie sighed. "But let's make it quick, huh? Every moment I'm not on the case, is a moment that my wardrobe gets closer to having that new hot dog smell."

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

 

Marcie turned the steering wheel, bringing her car into the next lane, while the thoughts about Chan and his warnings floated in her mind.

_'I hate not succeeding in something that I set my mind to do,'_ she thought.  _'I can do this. I can solve this mystery if I'm careful and smart, and I know that I am.'_

"If you hold that wheel any tighter, you're gonna rip it from the column," Red told her, matter-of-factly.

Marcie awoke with a start from her obvious fuming and noticed that her fingers were aching from the mindless death grip she was applying.

"Sorry," she sighed.

"I guess I better I ask before I forget," Red said. "What was that about over there in Chinatown? You got some sorta beef with that guy who... _somehow_  had the drop on me?"

"No," she said quietly. "If anything, we were kinda thick as thieves when we met in Macau."

"Oh, yeah! That's right," Jason jumped in. "You were an exchange student for about two weeks."

"Yep," Marcie said.

"You would think it would be kind of a big deal for the school, right?" Jason continued. "I mean, the principal and the rest of the staff were pretty stoked about it. The kids? Not so much."

"Big deal," Marcie said, irritable from the past. "I didn't care what the other kids at school thought. Macau was a great place, and I was the first Fleach to be made a foreign exchange student. I worked _hard_ for the privilege."

"Well, what happened in Macau?" Daisy asked. "We Blakes sometimes pack up and hit the road, but I don't think we've gone any closer than Hong Kong."

"Phooey!" Marcie yelled when another car cut in front of her. "Sorry, Daisy. I'll tell you guys."

"I was homestaying with a family who lived over a restaurant that they owned. They needed an extra set of hands, so they had me working with them there. I learned quite a bit of culture from them, when I wasn't learning about Portuguese and Cantonese cuisine.

One day, I saw Mr. Chan sitting in the restaurant, finishing up a plate of Macanese Chili Shrimps and looking out the window. I had heard a little bit about him, here in America, so I was kinda surprised to see him there. When I went to give him his check, he had already figured out that I was an American exchange student before I had even said anything.

Anyway, I figured it was my turn to do some deduction. He kept glancing out of the window, so I knew that he must have been in the middle of a case, or something, and was keeping an eye on someone outside.

I admit it. I was curious.

But before I could ask him anything about it, he took off from the restaurant. He paid the check, but in his rush, a folded piece of paper fell from his jacket pocket. I opened it to read, but my Chinese wasn't so good, so I let one of the family members read it for me.

Like I said, I was curious.

Good thing, too, because it said that Mr. Chan's kids, the music group, The Chan Clan, were kidnapped and wouldn't be released unless their dad stops his investigation on them.

Whoever "them" were.

This was big-time trouble. I took the note and ran out after him. It was crowded outside, but I managed to see him grab a trishaw. The note was important, and I wanted to give it back to him, so I grabbed another one to follow him to a recording studio.

I followed him to a hallway and saw him go into a recording studio, but when the door opened again, two guys walked out wearing green suits with black hexagons on the lapels.

When they were gone, I went into the studio.

I was blown away from what I saw, but not as much as Chan was. He was trapped in a soundproof booth trying to get out. He saw me and pointed to a small device in the corner of the booth, then went back to covering his ears. It was some kind of sonic weapon.

I put on a pair of headphones, pulled out one of my acid vials and burned the lock on the door leading in. Let me tell you, the headphones weren't much help. The sound waves made my head ring, but I took out another vial and poured it on the weapon, wrecking it.

Once our ears stopped ringing, I told him about the letter he left behind and asked him who had kidnapped the kids. He wouldn't tell me, but he thanked me and told me to go home.

It was then that I found something on the floor in the booth. A sheet of paper that read, _'A parent should always have sound judgment.'_

Sound. A recording studio. Nice.

Anyway, I was about to think about Chan's warning when those two guys in green showed up. I guess they found out that their toy wasn't working any more.

At the time, my Discouragers were still in the experimental stage, but it was nice of those two to be my guinea pigs and test them out.

After we escaped, Chan told me that that was the studio where his kids were rehearsing in before the kidnapping. That was a clue, all by itself, so I pulled out the piece of paper I took from the studio. It wasn't much to look, but then I saw something.

I held it to the sunlight, and saw that the paper had a watermark. Then I had a huge, ginormous hunch and asked Chan for his letter. Sure enough, when I lifted it to the sun, I could see the same watermark. A giant musical note.

Even Chan admitted that he hadn't seen it, at first.

Anyway, he brought me back to the restaurant, he told me to stay out of it, and then left.

I figured that I was already in trouble for leaving the restaurant, so I might as well see this through. So, I followed Chan, again. I'd explain it to my host family later."

"Where did he go?" Red asked.

"The first place he went to was a hotel," Marcie recounted. "But before he could get in, he was nabbed by more of those same green goons, who were hiding in a car in the parking lot.

Now, I had to follow  _these_  guys, and almost blew my whole salary on the ride, by the time I'd gotten to where the goons' car had finally stopped, some old blimp hangar just outside of town.

They took him inside, but luckily, there weren't any guards outside, so I got as close as a side door of the hangar. It was unlocked, so I slipped in, saw a set of lockers, nearby, and hid inside one of them.

I opened the door a little and saw what looked like a huge, white blimp surrounded by scaffolding and a walkway leading up to its gondola. Well, it  _looked_  like a blimp, but it was actually metal, because there were other goons doing welding around what would have been the airbag.

Chan was taken up into the ship and I had a choice to make. Sneak back out and try to call the police, and by the time they'd have gotten here, who knows what would happened to Mr. Chan, or I could help him, somehow.

Good thing the locker I was in had a spare uniform.

I changed and mingled with the other goons until I made my way to the walkway and into the ship.

I didn't know my way around so I wandered until I found myself in the bridge. Some other goon in there called me an engineer and told me to go check on the ship's anti-gravity drive."

"Anti-gravity?" Jason asked, "Who  _were_ these guys?"

"Anyway," Marcie continued. "I told him that I was new here and I didn't know where that was, so he pointed to a directory on the wall. It showed where Engineering was, but more importantly, it showed me where the  _brig_  was.

I left and went straight there. After I incapacitated the guard with some Insta-Ice capsules, I took his laser pistol-"

"What?" Daisy asked, skeptically.

"No lie," said Marcie. "And I asked him nicely how to open the door. Charm and a weapon pointed at you can do wonders.

After I typed in the code, the door opened and inside was not only Mr. Chan, but the entire Chan Clan, too.

Suffice to say, Chan was a little irritated to see me, but then I explained that I was seen with him by those two goons, earlier. I'd be endangering my hosts if I stayed at their home, and what kind of exchange student would I be, if I did that?

After asking my friend, the guard, where we could communicate with the outside, Chan managed to call the local Macau police, who eventually surrounded the hangar.

Turns out, the goons were actually trying to repair the ship, but since they hadn't finished, they couldn't get away and were soon arrested.

Except for the one person who made the whole kidnapping possible. Chan and I took care of that, last.

We went back to the hotel that Mr. Chan went to earlier, with the police in tow, and went up to the room of The Chan Clan's manager. When we entered and talked to him, we saw, on his table, a notepad with the same watermarked paper that the other notes were written on.

When we showed him the notes, he tried to run, but he was caught easy enough.

He soon confessed that PERIL, those green guys, came to him with a suitcase full of money and asked him to help grab Chan's kids because Chan was getting too close to one of their operations, some laboratory. He took the bribe and, because he knew where the band would be at all times, set up the kidnapping.

Not too shabby working with a super-detective like the great Charlie Chan, huh? I even got an autograph of him and all of his kids on a sheet of the incriminating notepad as a souvenir of my trip."

So engrossed were the passengers to Marcie's tale that they only just noticed that she was parked in the driveway of the Blake Mansion.

"Anyway, that's how we met," Marcie concluded. " Okay, kids, get your shoes on. We're at Grandma's"

* * *

Daisy's bedroom in the Blake Mansion was a curious blend of femininity and petroliana. Her soft-colored, frilly, four-poster bed and decorative pink and white furniture shared space with a tastefully placed pair of restored, gravity-fed gas station pumps, a trophy wall that displayed a grand collection of rare and classic motometers, and a couch made from the restored back-end of a proudly finned pink Cadillac.

On one corner of the room, however, stood a small group of short, glass-topped tables. The mismatched screws, alone, that held the tops to the hodge-podge selection of legs helped cement the notion that the furniture was, to be charitable, handcrafted.

"How do you like them?" Daisy asked with heartbreaking enthusiasm. "Be honest, now. I know. Pretty good, huh? Yeah, I'm pretty crafty when I put my mind to it."

Red stepped closer to Daisy. "Those tables look sick, babe."

"You got right," Marcie muttered.

"They're righteous," Red added. He then gave a warning glance to the others, who swallowed their true feelings about the tables and begrudgingly gave their compliments to the eager Miss Blake.

Marcie gave a shrug after giving the tables a longer, more positive look. She could see them as art or as functional objects, but they as least they looked sturdy.

"Are you gonna sell them?" she asked Daisy.

"Huh?"

"The tables. They actually look nice with the glass tops."

"Of course," Red jumped in. "Daisy's a real artiste. Like Susan B. Anthony."

Daisy walked over to her bed and sat down into the bed's plush comforter.

"Aw, thanks, guys," she said. "Those tops came in really handy, y'know? Perfect sizes, too, so I can make the tables all the same size."

"Well, they do look nice, Daisy."

"Thanks. I wasn't thinking of selling any of them," Daisy admitted. "I just wanted to create something with them, but I'll give you one, Marcie. You can put it in that lab of yours to dress it up a little. It *is a little drab."

"Thanks, Daisy. I hadn't noticed that the place needed some feng shui," Marcie muttered, shrugging away the backhanded-sounding comment. "Maybe it'll help me find the connections I need to solve this mystery."

Marcie gave a glance over to Jason, who was looking troubled and holding his cell phone low and against his hip.

"Is the sheriff still yelling at us for interrupting his lunch?" Marcie asked, simply.

Jason reluctantly lifted the phone away from his hip so that everyone in the room could hear every profanity-cluttered word and legally questionable threat the sheriff could blast from his end.

"Geez, that's loud," Red complained. "Hey, Jason, can you take it off Speakerphone, at least?"

"It's not on Speakerphone," Jason said, morosely.

"So much for getting Bucky to give us some dirt on the case," Daisy sulked, then brightened for a moment. "Ha! Get it? Dirt? Washing machines?"

When she noticed that her joke wasn't carrying over to the rest of the gang, she went back to her sulk. "Never mind."

Marcie gave a stretch and angled to walk out of Daisy's bedroom, saying, "Well, as interesting as it was to see your creative side, Daisy, I better get back to my  _drab_  lab so I can try to find clues to lose sleep over, later, while trying to piece them together."

Daisy waved her hand to stop Marcie from leaving. "Oh, Marcie, don't forget your table." Then she regarded the others. "Everyone get a table before you leave, okay?"

Marcie turned back to pick her complimentary table, and then idly noticed its construction when she approached.

"I'm surprised that you didn't crack the glass when you put the screws in," she said. "Not bad."

"Thanks," Daisy said. "That's because the glass is so thick. I don't think a bullet could get through one of those things."

A thought then struck Marcie, making her pick up her table and appraise it with a careful eye. "Hey, Daisy, you said that all of these glass tops were the same size when you found them?"

"Yeah. Some of them were broken in the alley, but the ones I that got were pretty good. Why?"

"I love it when I get this feeling," Marcie said to herself with a slight smile. She knew it well. It was the feeling she had when she solved the riddle to a frustrating chemical equation. It was the feeling she had when she luxuriated in the thoughts of Velma...

"Huh?" Jason said, then he recognized the look and groaned, "Oh, no. I know  _that_  feeling. It feels like trouble."

Marcie ignored him and asked Daisy, "Do you know where that alley is?"

"Yeah, why?"

Marcie's smile broadened. "Because, guys, I think that glass just made everything clearer."

 


	4. Chapter 4

It was in a older part of town, a smaller part, a lonelier part. A section that bred small, older businesses that live and died by the whims of local supply and demand. This alley, similar to so many others in the area, bespoke the rise and fall of the neighborhood.

Currently, it was telling the tale of the fall of a laundromat that went defunct in the Seventies on one side and the survival of a old hardware store on the other. And in its center length through the neighborhood, amidst the overflowed garbage cans and rusted fire escapes, was, to Daisy Blake, treasure, in neat little stacks on the cool, cracked, cemented ground. 

The movements of the four teenagers sneaking through the alley was interrupted slightly by the sound of broken glass crunching underfoot that echoed off the dirty, brick walls.

"Careful. Don't step on any glass," Daisy admonished Marcie after she lifted her foot from off the crushed shards. “It could be more of those tops.”

"Sorry. This is where you found them?" Marcie asked while she scanned the alley ahead of her, walking deeper into it.

"Yeah," Daisy answered as she kneeled down and picked up another small stack of glass disks from the ground. "They were stacked just like these little beauties. It's nice to have throw-away stuff found so neatly."

Red looked to the ground and saw the shattered, glittering remains of other glass tops. 

"Guess you didn't want those, huh?" he asked her.

"What good are they, except getting you to the hospital with a handful of cuts," Daisy said.

Marcie looked around the alley, trying to find something that made it stand out, anything that incriminated it in some way. If the walls or ground ever touched who came through here, they were silent with their secrets.

"Why were they here in the first place?" asked Marcie. "Who left them here?"

"And...are they still around?" Jason muttered, nervously, trying to calm himself by looking up at the bright sky through the dark alley walls.

"If someone is dropping off these glass disks here," Marcie reasoned. "Then it stands to reason that our deliverer might come back."

"If they do," Daisy said. "I hope they leave so more."

"I hope they start some trouble," Red said, cracking his knuckles. "I need a little exercise."

"Wait," Marcie alerted them, her eyes spotting something that finally did stand out against the grimy dimness of the alley.

Walking up to the old laundromat's emergency exit, she examined a streak of white paint against the inside of the otherwise faded and rusty doorframe.

"This was fresh," Marcie mused aloud. "Something white rubbed hard against this. Maybe our robots?"

Jason approached, examined, and then pointed to something else about the door that she had missed.

"That's not the only thing, guys," he said, peering lower at the door. "Check it out. Someone put a new lock in this. They must be using this building."

"Then it's time I took out my key," Marcie said, pulling out an acid vial.

The interior of the laundromat was dusty, dim, and empty. Its only lighting was the daylight coming through the dingy, wide front window. The washers, dryers and coin machines were long gone, but the dubiously comfortable plastic chairs remained, as was the tiled floor, broken and dirty where tile was to be found.

Red swung the old door open slowly, and now, it became a little brighter as particulates of dry, cracking paint from the door's wake, floated in the extra light.

The rest stepped in after Red, closed the door behind them, and looked around the place, ignoring the scent of dust, disuse, moist rot and small, hidden animals.

"Whoa," Red said.

The gang followed Red's gaze and stood surprised, focusing on the unexpected sight of a large number of front-loading washing machines, too clean to have been left behind, collected in a haphazard pile in a far, dark corner of the room.

They rushed towards it, Marcie, taking out her penlight to help with the group inspection.

Upon finishing, she said, "They're all the same make and model. Tsunami 2400's by Cleanco. These have to be the ones that were stolen."

Jason looked closely at the washers' doors, most of which hung open. 

"Well, this explains all of your glass tops outside, Daisy," he said. "Someone cut out all of the loading doors' windows." 

He carefully rubbed his finger along the metal frame of one of the doors where its circular window once sat. 

"With heat, apparently. Its smooth along the frame," he said.

Red gave a chuckle and said, "Didn't Bucky say that one of those flying robots laser-zap that guy the other night! Maybe they did that. Cracks me up."

Marcie perked up. "That's right, Red! Maybe they are! The robots are bringing the washers here and cutting out the windows."

"Aw, c'mon, Marcie," Red sulked. "Don't ruin my fun with facts!"

"But why are they cutting out windows?" Daisy asked. "Not that I'm complaining because I love what they're leaving behind for me."

"I haven't the foggiest," Marcie admitted, after a moment's thought. "But the robots must be making themselves at home here, since I don't see any footprints and Mr. Ackerman said that the robots floated."

"C'mon, guys. Let's get outta here. We've found enough clues around here, haven't we?" asked Jason.

"Maybe," Marcie muttered, trying to think off what she might miss in the time allotted by Jason's cowardice. ‘I can always come back later,’ she thought. 

Marcie led the way back to the closed door, then reached out to grab the corroded door knob. 

"But we're really close to solving this one," she told them. "I can feel it."

The door shuttered, and everyone froze.

The door was bodily pushed opened just as the gang backed away. 

The sunlight from the alley was cut abruptly by the angular shapes of four white robots, floating, impossibly, to the group's eyes.

Collectively, they didn't want to get boxed into a corner, so they maneuvered, in a tight cluster, to the widest space in the room. To their worry, however, they realized that they had backed up together into the center of the room.

The first two moved quietly ahead of the other two, who demonstrated their strength by carrying a washer in their arms. 

The protective vanguard’s most basic sensors found the humans easily, and they immediately raised an arm which extended a barrel from the center of their gauntlets. Their charges moved over to the pile of washers and set theirs down with mechanical grace. Then, they joined the others.

Marcie and the others began to realize how easily they had set themselves up by huddling together in a nice, targeted group, however, Jason who made sure that the others were shielding him as effectively as he could make them, understood it much better.

Gripping the backs of both Marcie and Red's shirts and peeking between their shoulders, Jason screeched from behind, "Red, punch them! Punch them! Marcie, use your chemicals on them! Use them! Use them!"

Marcie was about to yell back at him to release her, but Red gave an eager smirk as he replied, "That's the smartest thing you said, yet, Jumbo!"

Red broke from the group and engaged the closest armed robot in a embracing rush, shoving it from it aim. 

Marcie had to admit that Jason's wailing was, in fact, tactically sound. Standing where they were was only making it easier to get cut down.

With a fluid move, she reached into her jacket, slipped out an acid vial, uncorked it with a deft thumb and finger flick, and splashed the liquid wide.

The acid cascaded across the heads of two of her targets, a carrier and its escort, boiling through their armor and dripping corrosive destruction into their exposed computer brains.

The escort began to misfire all around the building, causing everyone, but the wrestling Red, to duck and scramble in reflex. The carrier, however, attacked with Herculean grabs, swipes and punches at whatever it bumped into, which wound up being either the pilfered washers in the corner, the bare, cobwebbed walls, or the abandoned chairs lined under the building's sole window.

Daisy lifted her head from her prone position to see what the stricken robots would do next. It didn't take long to see. 

The carrier began to drunkenly fly in her general direction, which was close enough to her. 

Daisy rolled away from its path, and the robot collided hard into the side of its equally damaged brother. In reaction to the contact, the escort turned unsteadily and targeted the carrier, just as the carrier rammed one of its arms into the escort's midsection.

Marcie sat on the dirty floor with a feeling of both fear and rapt fascination as she watched the two robots gut and laser decapitate each other, until their anti-gravity bases finally gave out from code errors and simple power failure, and they fell to the floor with a crash.

From the laundromat's locked front door, Jason crouched and fearfully watched the battle from his vantage point. Then, he turned his attention to Red to see how he fared.

Red was still wrestling with the other escort, his hand gripping tight the automaton's wrist, trying to point its weaponized gauntlet away from the rest of the gang, in what looked like an awkward, desperate dance of death.

From the corner of his eye, Jason noticed that the remaining carrier was making a move towards him, prompting him to run, with surprising speed for his size, past Daisy, who crouched by the window. 

The machine, upon seeing Daisy as the next closest target, decided on attacking her. 

Red, meanwhile, still strained his arms and shoulders against the robot's combative might, but managed, intelligently, to keep using his momentum versus the machine’s gliding anti-gravity to swing his opponent's laser arm away from his friends, whenever he could see them from his peripheral vision.

At the moment, Daisy was in Red's field of vision, as was the remaining carrier, raising its arms to crush her in a broken heap.

Red planted his feet for leverage, hefted up the robot's arm, just as the escort tried to fire on her, misfiring the shot and punching a lethal hole into the carrier, which then fell to the floor.

If Red's opponent could feel some emergent sense of remorse and anger at its fellow's destruction, it decided to demonstrate it against Red, right then and there. It retracted its weapon and focused simply on manhandling Red. 

Analyzing the move Red used to make it misfire, it braked, reversed its rotation and tore itself out of his Red's hands. Then, it grabbed him by the front of his shirt and lifted.

Red, by contrast, thought that this was a distressing, yet novel experience. No one had ever lifted him up off his feet by the front of his shirt before. That was a pleasure he would admit was exclusive to him and him alone. 

However, before he could think more on it, he felt himself jerked violently to the side and then flung toward Daisy, who had the good sense to duck, as his body sailed overhead and crashed through the dirty display window.

The pane's shards fell to the ground, shattering musically, and for the second time that day, Red found himself lying on the concrete, this time, the wind knocked sufficiently out of him, and not moving.

Marcie and the others, dangerously forgetting about the remaining robot, went through what was left of the window, in leaps, to attend to him.

The victorious robot, however, hovered in place, swiveling its head to regard the shocked teens, possible reveling in its triumph or contemplating its next attack.


	5. Chapter 5

His eyes opened to the sensation of light blows across his face. 

Slaps, perhaps.

As his brain gradually came back online, he could make out figures surrounding him in his initial confusion, and it wasn't until he willed himself to open his eyes fully and recognize the humanoids as Marcie, Jason and, to his secret relief, Daisy, did Red rouse himself from the ground.

"Are you okay?" Daisy asked him.

Red didn't want to say anything just then. He wished that time had stopped at that moment, looking into her eyes. They were stricken with fear and worry for him, but he didn't mind or care. The fact that they were that way because she cared for his welfare, moved him more deeply than anything he had ever felt in his rambunctious life. 

"You got the prettiest eyes," he slurred in response.

Marcie glanced over at the blushing Daisy, muttering her, "Oh, yeah. He's fine."

Jason managed to screw up enough courage to look back the broken window and beyond to see the victor of the fight. If the robot was ready to finish what was started, he wanted to know before he bolted to parts unknown.

But, to his relief and immediate confusion, he saw nothing. Other that the wreckage of its brethren, there was no sign of the other robot.

"Guys," Jason said, shakily. "I think it's gone."

Marcie got up and walked to the window frame and peered in.

Nothing.

She went back through the alley and stepped into the laundromat through the open emergency door. 

Pulling out her penlight, Marcie scanned the two washers that were put down by the two robots earlier, as she heard the sounds of her friends entered the building from where she did.

Daisy guided Red back to what was left of the window so they could sit and catch their breath on two of the dusty chairs there.

While that was going on, Jason walked cautiously to one of the destroyed machines that litter the already dirty floor, took out a small tool kit from a back pocket, and began to gingerly poke and probe its slightly smoky innards with a selected instrument.

"Only one was cut open, this time," Marcie told them. "Its window's gone." 

"Maybe it didn't have time to do them both," said Daisy.

Jason stopped his examination to ponder nervously. "Or maybe it found what it was looking for. Otherwise, nothing would have stopped it from wiping us out before cutting the other one apart."

Red, with confusion, watched Jason return to picking through the robots' corpses like a scavenger. 

"What are you doing, dude?" he asked. 

"I'm trying to see if these beautiful robots were autonomous or if someone controlled them remotely," Jason explained, his enthusiasm rising with each component he worked out of the inert hulk.

"Beautiful?" Red asked, wondering if he heard the boy wrong. "Weren't you the one giving me and Marcie game plays on how to beat them...from behind our backs?"

"Well...I didn't say they weren't dangerous," Jason defended himself. "Just that they're beautifully made, that's all."

Red rolled his eyes. "Nerds," he sighed.

"No, Red," Marcie interjected. "Jason might be on to something."

Then, as if to punctuate the notion, Jason pulled something free from the wrecked robot. Something that still had power and blinked steadily.

"Check it out, guys," Jason said, admiring the part as if it were a clue to King Solomon's Mine. 

Everyone crowded in to look at the component, but only Marcie and Jason gave it a more critical eye.

"Looks like some kind of transmitter," Marcie deduced.

"I think so, too. I yanked it out of what I think was its comms unit," Jason concurred. "I just hope its not calling out for more of its buddies."

"Well, assuming that the robot that left did find what it was looking for, then you're right. There's no sense in sticking around here to run into anymore of those flying food processors," Marcie mused as she walked back to the emergency door. The others soon following.

"Besides, we found what we came for, too," she said. "Clues that'll get us closer to solving this mystery. C'mon."


	6. Chapter 6

Marcie caught herself drumming her fingers against the table of the booth that she and her friends sat in inside Chen's coffee shop.

"Why are we back in Chinatown?" she asked them for the third time. She could have sworn it was the same booth that they had sat in before.

"Yeah," Jason said between slurps from his bowl of soup. "I like the food here, but there are other places."

Daisy stopped sipping her soda, looked out of the window and focused on the alley across the street. "Red told you. He couldn't find his motorcycle keys. He thinks he might've dropped them in that alleyway earlier."

Jason lifted his head from out of the soup bowl. "Oh, where he lost his fight with-"

Marcie rolled her eyes skyward in impatience. "Yeah, yeah. Don't worry about it. We'll let him check. I just hope it doesn't take long or the trail'll go cold."

A customer go up from his booth and walked to the front door. He was about to step outside when he saw something that halted his motion.

A burly body flew through the threshold of the open door and crashed to the floor with a beefy thud. The patron saw what threw him and he quickly fled.

Marcie and the others heard the commotion and stood up to see Red, his prone body holding the front door halfway ajar, slowly try to gather himself. He managed to hold up his keys.

"Found 'em," he proclaimed weakly.

An angular, white robot floated over its opponent and entered the cafe, prompting Jason to reflexively scream.

However, before the gang could think of dealing with this attacker, their collective heads turned in reaction to what was heard from the back of the cafe.

A startled cry, in Mandarin, came from kitchen. The proprietor himself, Mr. Chen, yelped for help, followed by the cacophony of falling and disturbed coffee pots and mugs.

The robot hovered further into the dinning area, its optics focused on Marcie and the others. Then, it swiveled its head to watch another robot exit from the kitchen and move closer to join it.

The customers, fearing themselves caught between those two menaces, took a chance that the first one wouldn't attack them, and stampeded past it to the front door. Luckily, Red had recovered enough of his wits to have gotten up before, so the panicky people had an unobstructed path to freedom.

Red brushed himself off, just as the cafe emptied out. He saw the machine who gave him the bum's rush, along with the other one, closing in on his friends, so he approached it from behind and gave it a mighty punch.

He regretted it, soon after, as his fist painfully banged off the robot's back, but it was the diversion that he needed.

The automaton stopped its progress and rotated to face Red. It impassionately raise its arms to batter the human, but Red was anticipating the attack and raised his hands to catch and redirect. So began another grapple.

The other, seeing that it was busy with the teenager, shifted itself and homed in on the others.

Jason, in a panic, moved deeper into the booth, just as Daisy and Marcie slipped out of it.

The two girls faced the machine while keeping open space between them so they didn't trip over themselves if they needed to evade.

The robot stopped, turning its head from one teen to the other in indecision, and like the proverbial hound trying to catch two rabbits, it momentarily didn't know which target to advance on. Marcie or Daisy.

Marcie quickly took advantage of the machine's hesitation and brandished an acid vial. With a careful splash, she managed to liquefy one of the robot's arms off at the shoulder, leaving a wide opening where its shoulder joint and motors once fit.

She then threw two of her Insta-ice capsules against its chest, as she backed away. As they shattered and released their chemicals into the air, Marcie watched the artificially induced ice thicken and crawl over the robot's carapace with satisfaction.

Between the damage from the acid and its movement being hampered by the ice, the robot underwent its own case of confused frustration as its anti-gravity base began to drag along the floor, so weighed down was it.

However, its programming gave it the single-minded impetus to continue moving slowly forward to harm them, even reaching out for Marcie with its surviving arm, after it deemed her the greater threat.

Jason kept himself tucked deeply in the booth. He was too terrified from the fighting that raged around him to act in a way other than self-defensively.

He took a glance over to the girls and his worry heightened further when he saw Marcie reach for another one of her capsules...and retrieved nothing. She was out of them!

All too easily, he thought about what would happen after the robot was finished dispatching them. It would go for him next!

Marcie moved back a bit further and the robot angled as best it could to follow, which actually made her grimly happy that it did. It was focused on her, alone.

"Daisy, I'm out!" she yelled. "You try to get Jason and Red and get outta here!"

The words hit Daisy with the weight of how bad the situation this was. With a finality that she didn't like.

"What about you, Marcie?" she asked, automatically. She wanted her friend to have already found a way out and wanted to hear it to assuage her worries.

"No time to worry about that!" Marcie told her, watching and dodging the free, mechanized arm and hand that swung out closer for her, eager for contact.

"Get outta here!" she ordered again. If worse came to worse, she hoped that they would tell her father what had happened.

At that moment, Jason's nerve broke after watching the drama playing out before him. Terrifyingly torn between defending his friends and just acting out of instinct, he gave a desperate wail, and thoughtlessly threw his half-eaten soup bowl at the machine, praying for no reprisal.

The bowl clattered and flipped against the robot's head, allowing the warm liquid to run across its head, melting enough of the ice to free its movement.

It turned that head in his direction, its cold stare promising even colder methods of killing him in the non-too-distant future.

Suddenly, the machine listed and sparked, dark grey smoke flowing out of the shoulder opening of the ruined arm, as broth ran down into it.

The robot's solid state brain made the closest approximation of an emotion: Exasperated incredulity. Then it made a sound that could have been equated to an electronic wail, as systems began to fail due to the cascading short circuits.

Its anti-gravity, and indeed, all of its systems, finally failed and then it toppled like a tree to the floor.

Grinning, Marcie looked at the panic-stricken boy in the booth and gave him a very grateful thumbs-up.

"Great save, Jason!" she exclaimed.

However, Daisy worryingly watched Red still wrestling with his metal adversary. She knew it wouldn't be look before even he tired, and the robot would take lethal advantage of it.

Desperate, she looked around for answers, then looked down at the destroyed machine before her.

It had fallen forward from its partial, icy entombment, displaying small vents along its upper back. Thinking about how Jason had finished their attacker, Daisy was suddenly seized with quick inspiration.

She ran back to their booth and grabbed two of their half-drunk soda glasses from their booth's table, while a confused Jason watched.

Red tried to shift the robot away from the rest of the gang, hoping against hope that he might be able to maneuver it back outside and buy the rest of them time to escape. But he could already feel his aching arms, back and hips beginning to falter. He was failing to manhandle the machine any further. And it knew it.

The robot finally took the offensive, lowering its arms enough to grab hold of Red's shoulders with a agonizing grip, and with a boost from its anti gravity base, surged forward, slamming Red's back against the cafe's counter.

Red's pained grunt gave Daisy the courage to run behind the robot, just as it noticed her nervous approach.

It had already calculated the proper strategy to deal with the female by whipping the large male into her, neutralizing her obviously feeble attack, and then slaying them both before they recovered.

It didn't, however, count on the female pouring a copious amount of soft drink into its ventilation slots.

The drinks mercilessly bathed every motherboard it could reach, sending the robot into deathly conniption fits.

It mindlessly tossed Red to the side as it fell into a twisting, purposeless spasm, ending in a short-circuiting, crashing and sliding impotently against the front of the cafe's counter. With a helpless shudder, it was finally dead.

The gang, as one, didn't move from their positions. They focused on catching their breath and gathering their startled wits.

A groan from the back roused them into concern, so they went to the kitchen area.

From within, they could see Mr. Chen begin to slowly rouse himself from a floor cluttered with fallen utensils and cookery.

Red reached down and hefted the slim, Asian man to his feet in one motion, then brushed the dust from his red suit.

"There ya go, dude," Red said to him. "Do you know what happened?"

Chen held his forehead, as if trying to shake out the cobwebs from the attack. He then straightened his hair and explained.

"That robot came up from behind and attacked me when I wasn't looking. It knocked me out and then went after you kids. I don't understand why it would attack me. I run an Internet coffee shop, not a laundromat," Chen huffed.

"Are you okay?" Marcie asked him. "Are you going to call the sheriff?"

Chen seemed to frown at that course of action, then he sighed in acquiescence.

"I suppose so," he groused. "Maybe, by some miracle, the law could actually do some good around here."

Marcie gave a thoughtful glance out of the kitchen door, to the smoking would-be assassins beyond the counter. Pressure was certainly being applied, somewhere, to wipe the teens out.

"It might, Mr. Chen," Marcie muttered. "It just might."


	7. Chapter 7

The night in Chinatown was typically quiet. What few people there were walked to their various destinations in silent peace. Except Mr. Chen, who jangled the group of keys in his spindly, aged hands after locking the front door of what was left of his coffee shop.

With his back to the street, he almost hadn't notice the soft putt-putt of the white convertible VW as it closed in on his establishment and then stopped to park.

Chen pocketed his keys and turned to watch Marcie and her friends disembark from the bug, then lean against its side as they regarded him.

"What brings you here?" he asked the assembly.

Jason gave a worryingly look as replied, "Personally, I don't know. All I do know is that I gotta get home soon before my mom get worried, or mad, which in most cases is the same thing."

Chen gave a quizzical look in response to the comment. Marcie waved Jason's words away. "Don't mind him, Mr. Chen. We just came over to see if you were okay."

Chen brightened at that. "Oh, yes, my child. You and your friends didn't have to go through all of that trouble."

"That's alright, sir," Marcie calmly said. "Besides, those robots who attacked you could be creeping around here tonight."

The look of askance returned to Chen, sharply. "What? What are you going on about, my dear?"

"This," Marcie said simply, holding up the still blinking component Jason extracted from the downed robot in the laundromat. "We had our electronics guru, Jason, here, take a closer look at it."

"I cracked that unit open and I found out that what I took out was kinda like a airplane's little black box, only, y'know...white," Jason explained. "It's been sending out a distress signal ever since, broadcasting to some central location."

"True, it was risky carrying that little white box around in my car, but it worked out in the end. We were able to trace the signal to that location." Marcie quietly told him. She then pointed to the small radar dish that was poking out from the Clue Cruiser's front fender. Itself, pointing at the front of Chen's shop. More specifically, at the Asian.

Chen bristled and puffed up in sudden indignation. "You...you think  _I_ had something to do with those crazy robots? They attacked me! You were there. They even attacked  _you_ , remember?"

Daisy assumed a flippant, knowing pose. "Yeah, we do. I don't know how  _you_  could've known that, though. Especially since you said that one of the robots  _knocked you out_ , earlier today."

"And, guy, when I picked you up," Red chimed in. "I felt something like a TV remote control in your suit."

"Plus, the fact that when we came to you, you said that you didn't understand why they'd attacked you. That you ran a coffee shop, not a laundromat," Marcie added. "How did you know that they hit laundromats, as well as appliance stores? We never told you about that."

Chen began to stammer in his attempt for an answer, causing Marcie to hold up one of her hands in dismissal.

"Face it," she said. "The attack in your shop wasn't real. At least, the part about the robots attacking you wasn't. It was just to keep us from suspecting that you were controlling the robots."

Red folded his broad arms against his even broader chest. "You sent those can openers after us to make the attack on you look legit, and if they happened to take us out, that would just be another win for you, wouldn't it?"

Chen found himself enough composure to answer clearly and angrily. "You children obviously don't know what you're talking about. Any of you. I am just a hard working Internet cafe owner who was just assaulted today. If you don't like what I'm selling in my shop, you can always go to another internet cafe and tea house, but don't insult me with lies and false accusations!"

"Well, you're right about one thing, Mr. Chen," Marcie said coolly. "I  _don't_  like what you're selling. I think I'll take my chances and stick to my guns about what I just said. It's a shame, too, since I thought you had the best Chamomile I've ever tasted."

The angry lines on Chen's angular face suddenly shifted smoothly into an honest, smirking sneer. The full weight of evidence pulling his lies down.

"Why, thank you, my dear," he shrugged in mild defeat. "When I get rid of all of you, I'll make my Chamomile tea the house special in honor of you."

"Oh, and your Colombian Roast, too," Daisy jumped in happily, somehow forgetting the rising threat in the air and hoping that he might add that as a special, as well.

"Hey, don't forget your won-ton soup!" Jason added enthusiastically.

"Your cappuccino was alright," Red muttered non-commitally before getting cut off by annoyed Mr. Chen.

"Enough!" he yelled at them. Then he reached into his suit.

Marcie and her friends' hearts suddenly jumped in their chest and they tensed as they saw the action. A weapon!?

Red fearfully raised his hands, saying nervously, "Okay, what if I said that it was better than alright?"

When they saw that his hand pulled out a small, white box and then press a button on its face, the group let out a collective, grateful sigh.

Four robots floated from behind the rear of the shop, like conical ghosts, and stopped behind him in a guarding position.

One of the machines closest to Chen, silently raised a hand holding a large, glass disk to him to appraise.

He chuckled aloud as he carefully hefted it in both hands and looked admiringly at its face and rear.

"Ah, finally, it's here, at last," he whispered in private triumph. "In Crystal Cove, of all places."

Marcie was about to ask a question, when a faint whine from above made Marcie turn her attention, expectantly, to the night sky.

"What is it, Marcie?" Daisy asked her. "It's just a plane, that's all."

"Daisy," Marcie muttered, causing the rest of the gang to bring their gaze upwards, as well. "That's no plane."

From a moonlit patch of clouds, something shinning in that same ethereal light, descended. As it lowered itself closer and closer into the watchers' range of vision, they could make out its shape and some details, even in the dark of night.

It looked to be a white airship, but the gasbag had a strange form. It was far too angular, too conical, and it certainly wasn't a zeppelin, for it looked too short. And even though they could see the glowing windows from its gondola, the long, dark aerodynamic fins that adorned its length, as well as the large, strange-looking pylon that extended from its flattened rear, gave the whole craft the anachronistic look of some spacecraft fashioned from aesthetics of the 1960's.

It kept lowering until it came so close to the tall, curved roof of the coffee shop that Marcie and the gang thought it was going to crash.

Although it was a testament to the pilot's skill that destruction was averted, the gang were mentally preparing to jump back into the Cruiser and high-tail it to a safer distance, when it finally stopped mere feet above Chen's shop.

From that distance, the gang could make out more of its surface detail, and from that, they could see that the airship's entirety was completely metallic, with a large hatch covering sitting well behind the gondola. And because it glided down in a near-vertical descent without any kind of thrust to be felt, it also seemed to be, impossibly, anti-gravitic.

Only Chen seemed nonplussed by its appearance. In fact, he seemed almost giddy about it.

"Ah, good work calling them, my PERILbots," he gloated. "It seems that I'm going to deliver the formula in style."

"What the heck is that?" Red asked, his eyes still glued to the unfamiliar sight before him.

"I know what it is," Marcie said with deadpan depression. "It's a SpaceBlimp, courtesy of PERIL."

Either in reply to her answer or due to simple satisfaction over the night's events, Chen gave a triumphant cackle, as the wide, metal hatch cover slid open and a huge, articulated hose snaked out of the hatch's darkness.

First, it sucked up the still laughing Chen and the robots, and then it quickly vacuumed the screaming kids just as they were beginning to scatter from the front of the cafe.

Then the umbilical retracted back into the maw of the hatch. The hatch slid closed, and then the SpaceBlimp began to rise quietly back into the night sky.

* * *

 

The interior of the gondola was, arguably, the busiest part of the vessel, with its helmsman, comms officer, radar man, and other green and black uniformed bridge officers focused on ship work, as the town's horizon, seen from the panoramic windows, gradually began to sink.

An armored door that led into the bridge opened, and Chen proudly led the procession of Marcie and her friends, guarded by an escort of the four PERILbots, inside.

A man in a tailored green and black suit, sitting on large chair that sat on a dais in the center of the room, swiveled it around to take the group in.

Chen left the captives and walked over to the man, who asked him, "Was the mission successful, Agent 2-11? We received the pick-up signal from one of our PERILbots moments ago."

"Look for yourself, Commander, "Chen said boldly, as he held up the washing machine window for the man to see. The commander had to lean forward and peer into its face to examine it, but when he saw the etchings on its surface, he straighten up in his chair and smiled broadly.

Then he gave a casual look at his prisoners. "And who are they?"

"Troublemakers," Chen sneered. "Nothing to worry about, but they know too much about us to let go."

Jason's rising fear was, for the moment, overridden by his sudden curiosity, and so he asked Marcie, who seemed to know more about who these people were than any of them, who they were.

"They're PERIL," answered Marcie in a strange, sneering voice. "The guys I told you about when I ran into Charlie Chan in Macau."

She then directed a sneering question to Chen. "Why are you here? Did you find out that Charlie Chan's daughter, Suzie, was here in Crystal Cove and wanted to kidnap her again?"

"Not at all, Miss Fleach," Chen answered, not noticing the change in her voice as he enjoyed his victory. "In fact, we weren't even aware that they were here in town, so focused were we our great mission. But thanks for telling us. I'm sure Interpol would thank you, as well."

Any look of confidence in knowing what was going on, slipped off Marcie's face and was replaced in sudden confusion.

"Interpol?" she asked incredulously. "Charlie Chan was an Interpol agent?"

"Of course," Chen explained. "Why else would he be keeping tabs on us in Macau? Why else were we forcing him to drop his investigation of us by kidnapping his children? He knew about our secret laboratory there."

He then walked up to peer, suspiciously, into Marcie's face. "We knew that he had help from someone, as well, a girl. But when we looked all over Macau, we couldn't find her. I suppose that was you, Miss Fleach?"

"Maybe," she growled from the side of her mouth. "I certainly didn't see you as someone who worked for PERIL. Why?"

Chen's eyes bore into hers. "Why? Because they offered me something that I could never get as the operator of some boring, old coffee shop. Power and prestige. They made me a sleeper agent here in Crystal Cove years ago. And an Internet cafe was the perfect cover for me to monitor you young idiots as you wirelessly networked and cruise the 'net via the radio frequency receivers built in to my shop's counter. I was activated when I got the call to look for the formula."

Marcie couldn't help but perk up at that. "Formula? What formula?"

"Nothing that you should concern yourself with," Chen dismissed. "I heard you talking about the thefts in my shop earlier, and knew that you were a threat to my operation. That's why I sent the robots after you, when you came back to the cafe. If they didn't finish you, then, at least, they would scare you from pursuing the matter further."

The SpaceBlimp's commander gave a smile and a shrug as he regarded Chen. "I wouldn't worry, Chen, it's not like she or her friends will be in a position to tell any one over the Pacific Ocean of what they've heard."

He gave a self-satisfied gaze to the youngsters. "PERIL is going to financially capitalize on the growing helium shortage that countries like Australia and America is suffering from, by creating a synthetic form of the gas that we will sell to them and other countries through our front companies."

Daisy, Red and Jason gave expressions that ranged from mild confusion, blank incomprehension, and the dawning of worried understanding.

Except Marcie. Her expression was one of shocked anger.

_'"Great minds think alike" be damned,'_ she thought.

"That was my idea!" she snarled aloud in the gondola. So loud, in fact, that some of the distracted bridge officers turned their heads momentarily to the source of the exclamation behind them.

"Of course it was," the commander said, waving her rage away with lazy hand before continuing his tale. "Anyway, we were close to coming up with a working formula to test when, thanks to Charlie Chan and Interpol, they found the laboratory where the formula was being worked on."

"All of that had something to do with washing machines?" Red asked incredulously.

"Strangely enough, yes," the commander said. "According to our reports, one of our scientists, who was working on the formula, escaped the raid and hid in a appliance factory. He reported his location to us and then told us what he did next. Fearing that Interpol would catch him, he took a glass cutter that he found in the loading area of the factory, found a washing machine that was on its way to being shipped out of China, and etched what little of the formula he knew into its window."

"Heavy," Jason mutter in admiration.

"Yes," agreed the commander. "He managed to tell us the model of the washing machine, before Interpol tracked him down. Alas, he killed himself to keep the secret. We sent agents to the factory after Interpol left and managed to track the shipment to California, but we couldn't narrow it to a specific location. So we've been searching every city and town in the state. Crystal Cove was the next place to search."

"And I've finally found it!" Chen crowed at them. "When I present it to our leader, The Monarch, he'll reward me most generously. Maybe he'll even give me command of my own SpaceBlimp. Then I'll join the others as we fight to crush Australia's zeppelin fleet. Those fools! They should have never stuck their noses into our business when they protected that American cargo transport from our ambush."

Political understanding dawned on Daisy's face. "No wonder the news talks about you guys and the Aussies."

"Yes," the commander said to her. "And how ironic it would be to have them buy our brand of helium to keep afloat, never knowing that their money is helping to keep  _us_  afloat."

The commander dipped one of his hands down to a control panel set in the front of the arm of his command chair and depressed a small, white button.

From a far wall slid open several panels that revealed manacled alcoves, and it didn't take the gang long to figure out who they were for.

"Now, no more questions," Chen barked at them. "You are all now prisoners of PERIL."

The commander turned to the helmsman. "Set a course for our secret base in the Pacific," he ordered. "Who knows? Maybe these fools might make good PERIL agents, if we find them useful.

Marcie could see the starry heavens begin to slowly rotate away as she growled to Chen, "I guess you need to  _be_  a fool to join PERIL."

"Humph," he scoffed in reply. "We just want your smarts, not your smart mouth."

Chen glanced over to one of the PERILbots who accompanied him in the aircraft, hovering near the helmsman's avionics board.

"You! Take off her jacket," he commanded it. "She has chemicals hidden in there. I saw her use them to help disable one of your lot, earlier."

The robot guard floated over and took Marcie back to the flight board, put its hands under her arms and lifted them open. Since she never buttoned her jacket, it opened up from her raised arms.

It then began to rummage through its inner pockets, taking out various capsules, small tools, a magnifying glass, and two small vials of acid, putting them all on an unoccupied area of the slightly sloping the avionics board, for the sake of its convenience.

"And the rest of you robots," Chen said to the other floating automata. "Get ready to put the prisoners into the holding cells."

While the rest of the gang was either focused on Marcie's confiscated items on the control board or their rising worry as the other PERILbots approached them, Marcie's closed mouth starts to move about.

With a soft crunch, Marcie bit down and spat out a leaking Insta-Ice capsule at the flight board. The liquid began to congeal and freeze across its surface almost immediately.

The helmsman was the first to notice the ice growing and spreading out, knocking over her other capsules and, importantly, the acid vials.

Both glass tubes fell on each other and shattered, releasing their cargo, which quickly began eating a bubbling hole through the metal floor, destroying vital wiring and cables as they flowed down.

The airship suddenly bucked and tilted upward, and a violently, shuddering list was suddenly felt throughout the airship.

So violent was the movement, that when the floor shifted out from underneath Chen's feet, he, to his horror, let the washing machine window slip from his hand, which then bounced against the back of the helmsman's helmet.

With a deflected spin, the window finally fell against the steel floor and broke, but because it was so thick, it cracked apart in only three large pieces and a few distant shards.

Although the PERILbots easily righted themselves in mid-air, most of the officers and all of the gang, with the exception of the helmsman, who was hanging on desperately by the control yoke, and Chen, who managed to be quick enough to hang on to one of the arms of the fallen commander's chair, stumbled and rolled roughly to one side of the control cabin and stopped harshly, as a sore pile, against one of its wide windows.

Clearly to everyone on board that the SpaceBlimp, it was not as ship-shape as it once was.

  
  



	8. Chapter 8

Charlie Chan looked out in dismay from the windshield of his sedan as he arrived and parked in front of Chen's Internet cafe. Far above the establishment, he could see the stricken SpaceBlimp, hovering in a stationary, yet wobbling position.

He stepped out of his car just as Interpol agents in another car, trailed by Sheriff Stone in his cruiser, parked nearby.

Stone stepped out of his car and huffed, "It's bad enough that we both get calls from Meriwether and those kids she hang out with," Stone huffed as he stepped out of his car. "But explain to me again why I should let you guys walk all over my jurisdiction."

Charlie Chan looked at the man and realized that, truly, the sheriff was put on Earth to test the patience of men like the Chinese-American detective.

"Because we are Interpol, Sheriff Stone," he explained. "International Police. We have  _international_  reach."

"And what, kind sir, does that have to do with America?" Stone boldly asked him.

Chan sighed and rolled his eyes upward to keep his attention back to the swaying, swerving airship over the coffee shop.

"What is going on here?" he asked one of the officers.

"It looks like a blimp is caught in the breeze, sir," he answered simply.

Chan gave another sigh, this time, at the non-answer.

"Thank you," he deadpanned.

* * *

 

Klaxons howled all over the SpaceBlimp's interior, and amidst the racket, an engineer's voice could, amazingly, be heard over the intercom warning that although the craft's anti-grav repellers and main engine were fine, its atomic furnace, its power plant, was starting to overload.

That distressing news was added by the struggling helmsman telling the disheveled commander below him that the airship was losing some of its steering.

"Try to right us!" the commander yelled up at him. He looked down in terror at the thin lines of cracks that begin to creep across the stressed-out window that he and the others were laying upon. Falling out of a broken window to meet his maker was not what he signed up for when he joined PERIL.

One of the PERILbots decided to take the initiative and sidled next to the pilot, gripping the control yoke with motorized strength. Then, with slow, irresistible power, it fought against the downward weight of the helmsman and turned the yoke, inch by inch, and righting the vessel by the same amount.

Soon enough, PERIL officers and young detectives tumbled off of one another as the airship stabilized.

The commander, finally stumbling into his command chair, swiveled around to face the forward windows and the backs of his subordinates.

"Status, helmsman!" he barked.

"Navigation is frozen on its last heading, sir. The Pacific," came the frustrated report.

Chen managed to find his footing once more, as the rest of bridge officers returned to their posts, but he didn't care. All he knew was that some pestilential geek just ruined maybe his one and only chance to please his masters, big time, and he wanted sweet and swift payback.

"Forget about that!" he screamed to anyone who would listen, pointing at the youngsters with a finger that shook with rage. "Just kill them!"

The PERILbots turned to face the regrouping youths, metal hands raised to rend flesh.

That was when Daisy noticed something small approach her. She took a look down by her feet and saw one of Marcie's capsules roll against it.

With a slight smile, she quickly bent down, swiped the capsule into her hand, then stood up again. She hoped it was the one they needed.

Daisy threw the capsule hard against the metal deck. Acrid smoke flowed out of its cracked shell, filling most the cabin and confusing the robots and PERIL members both.

"Yes!" Daisy coughed happily through watering eyes. "It's one of Marcie's Discouragers!'

Red, who was closest to the cabin door, slammed his fist into the control panel set into the nearby wall, opening the portal.

"C'mon!" he yelled to his comrades in between coughs. "Let's bug out!" He was in no mood to throw his weight around with those machines, once again.

Because they were closer to him, he could hear the rest of the gang having no trouble following him through the choking smoke and back into the chamber that held the airlock/umbilical set-up that had brought them up.

* * *

 

Far below, the small group of law enforcement looked up to see the airship lurch, its needle-like bow still pointing in the direction of the sea.

"What in the name of Funky Fritters is that?" Stone asked, pointing up to see a tube unfurling and extending to its full length from the belly of the SpaceBlimp.

The opening of the umbilical managed to reach just above the coffee house's roof, swaying and thrashing under the badly, out-of-control aircraft, that, luckily, had not moved from over the location of the shop, even though it had risen well above it.

Red Herring was the first to slide out of the tube into a hard landing, scrabbling from the highest section of the shop's pagoda-style roof, followed by Jason, who, despite his bulk, also managed to stop his tumble from the roof with swift, half-crazed reflexes. Daisy flew from the tube's opening next and caught herself along the roof's curving ornamentation.

Chan and Sheriff Stone, followed by the other Interpol officers hurried over to the facade and sides of the building, watching the youths as they awkwardly climbed from each level of the roof, guiding them with the sounds of their voices, and their arms outstretched to try and catch them if they fell.

It wasn't long before both men began to wonder, and then worry, why they hadn't seen Marcie on the roof, as they helped the last of them down.

"Where's Margo?" asked Stone, reflexively. Even though she got on his last nerve at times, she was a citizen under his legal protection, and though loathed to admit it, he didn't want to see her hurt.

"Marcie," Chan corrected. His cool demeanor was staring to buckle from the worrying knowledge of not seeing the girl. He hadn't felt this anxious since the mission in Macau. Since the threat of losing his sons and daughters. Marcie had spared him that terror by helping him finding them, but could he find the courage to tell her own loved one if she didn't come back?

Both men looked up. They had no way of controlling the airship or bringing it down, and it looked as though the ship was finally starting to move forward from the coffee shop, towards its flight over the sea, waywardly dragging its smoking tube along Crystal Cove, like the unattended string of some errant balloon.

A sound...a scream...suddenly echoed from the mouth of the tube as it drifted over Charlie Chan's sedan, and then Mr. Chen came out, bouncing painfully off its roof, and then rolling down its windshield to rest on its hood.

The officers ran over to help the hacking, distraught man, but then changed action when they heard Chan call out to arrest him. Still, Chen was far too happy from his escape to protest as they restrained him.

"Where is Marcie Fleach?" asked Chan, the smooth timbre of his voice momentarily shaking with perceivable anger.

"I don't know," Chen answered, almost sounding petulant. "She did something to damage the SpaceBlimp, and then there was all of this smoke."

He pointed at the youngsters who were recovering by the front doors of his building. "I followed them down the tube when I felt my way out of the bridge. I don't think anyone else followed me."

"Hey, you guys!" shouted Daisy, after she found her footing. "Where's Marcie? Is she stuck on the roof? Did she come down after us?"

Neither man could answer quickly, and all present just sadly watched as the SpaceBlimp continued to cruise high over the next block, its tube lazily whipping over some landmark trees across the street.

A coughing, smoke-trailing Marcie Fleach finally fell out of the tube's mouth and landed in a unwieldy crash through the canopy of one of the trees, which luckily broke her fall.

Her friends, the sheriff and Charlie Chan ran across the street and encircled the tree, gratefully helping her down from its life saving boughs, not noticing, either from the dimness of the night or the collective joy of her escaping, that her bow was missing.

Marcie leaned against the trunk of her savior, catching her breath and luxuriating in the knowledge that she had safely reached terra firma. However, she wasn't excused from answering all of the questions that came at her from all sides.

"How'd you take the ship out like that?" Red asked her, wondering how they ever got out of such a situation so quickly, since he knew that *he certainly didn't have a plan outside of trying to slug their way out.

Marcie opened her mouth to answer, and to everyone's surprise, she spoke in a heavy lisp. "Wen dat hoth thucked me up, I pop da Intha-eyeth capthule in ma moud. I thigured that I'd need it, and I did. Yuck!"

"Why are you talking like that?" Daisy asked.

"Wen I bid into da capthule," Marcie mumbled. "Thum of da chemicule leaked into ma moud. Ma tung is a liddle num."

"Well, that was very clever of you, Miss Fleach," Chan commended her with a sigh of relief. "Also, that one of you called me after you discerned the guilt of Mr. Chen."

Jason proudly raised his hand to get the detective's attention. "That'll be me, sir. That's me being clever."

"Indeed," said Chan, as they all walked back to their cars across the street. "I'll have to remember that the next time I report to my superiors."

Charlie Chan strolled over to the Interpol agents' car and addressed the defeated man in its back seat. "But I'm afraid there will not be a "next time" for you, Mr. Chen. Your little spy operation is going to be shut down."

In response to those words, all Chen could do was mutter in a broken voice full of sad frustration, "I...failed PERIL. Without the formula...All of our future riches were going to be generated with what we came up with...rúguo ta bùshì wèi nàxie ài guan xiánshì de háizi."

"What did he say?" Jason asked Chan.

"He said '...if it hadn't been for those meddlesome kids,'" the detective smoothly translated.

"Oh," everyone said. Chan then turned to the other Interpol man.

"Contact the Coast Guard and tell them that PERIL agents are heading across the Pacific Ocean in one of their vessels," he ordered. "It's damaged, so tell them to look for survivors."

A roar then took their attention and they all turned their gazes skyward. The SpaceBlimp's rear began to glow with a sudden and full ignition. Its rear pylon, a large, single jet engine, blasted into life, surging the ponderous aircraft higher and higher from the town and further and further towards the sea.

"What's happening, now?" Stone exasperatingly asked, more to himself than to anyone nearby.

"Da ship's adomik powa pland was goin ta blow," she explained. "I herd dat dere steering had ben locked ta take dem out ova da ocean, bud wid all da damage on board, id probabee dook a liddle longa fo dere engine ta kick in."

"Atomic power plant?" Stone fretted. "It won't make me look like some kinda freak, if it blows up, will it?"

"No more dan usual," Marcie quipped, as everyone watched the vessel fly off.

Up, up, up the airship went, carried by its rocketry and surviving avionics over the town's horizon, past the coast, and towards the sea, until, when it was just a moonlit, metal speck over the Pacific, it finally detonated with a brilliance to match the moon and then disappeared in the night.

Although everyone else heard and felt the soft whump of the distant explosion, Marcie kept a surreptitious gaze across the street at the tree she fell into. A tree whose dark branches hid something hastily bundled in a wide length of cloth.

 


	9. Chapter 9

A digital clock, which sat on one end of the counter in Marcie's laboratory, dutifully displayed that it was four-thirty in the afternoon. Beside it was a coiled pile of red cloth.

A quiet knock on the door took Marcie's focus from the string of chemical notations that she was scrawling on one side of a chalk-line bisected blackboard.

"Yes?" she called out.

"May I come in, Miss Fleach?" came the polite reply.

"Of course, Mr. Chan," she said, already recognizing the voice. "C'mon in."

"I noticed that you have lost your lisp," he said as he stepped in and gave a casual glance to both Marcie's still bowless attire and the object on the counter near her. "And found your ribbon."

"Oh, no. I bought another one earlier today. Good thing, too. About me losing the lisp, I mean. It would've been tough getting my dad and teachers to understand me, well, no harder than usual," she quipped.

Chan gave a sympathetic nod. "At any case, I have come by to congratulate you, in behalf of Interpol, for last night's events. We've apprehended the few PERIL agents who managed to jump ship, and although we do not have this formula that they talked about, your latent detective skills have come to the fore, yet again, and you have foiled PERIL's schemes."

Marcie's blushing face looked down slightly. "That's high praise, sir. If I learned anything about deduction, it came from you."

Then, with a slight bow of respect and a deep rush of humility, Marcie said, humbly, "And I'd like to apologize for my attitude earlier. You were just worried about me and I didn't see it."

"Think nothing of it," Chan shook his head and hand-waved. "Youth will have its say, but maturity comes when the wisdom of elders is  _heard_."

"Well said," Marcie concurred with a wan smile.

Outside, in Chan's idling car, its driver, a junior Interpol agent, signaled Chan by honking the horn. Chan soon emerged from the house's backyard and entered the car from the front passenger side.

"How was it back there?" asked the agent, for the sake of conversation.

"It was fine," Chan replied. "She has her bow, apparently."

"That's...interesting, sir." He didn't know where this was going, but he felt that had to say something, nonetheless.

"She said that she had to buy a new one. I suppose the old one was lost on board the SpaceBlimp."

"Sounds nice, sir?" the driver replied, awkwardly.

"Indeed," Chan agreed. "Except I noticed that she was looking at the tree that she fell into last night. This morning, I decided to take a look at it and I found a torn scrap of her old ribbon hanging in one of the branches. Curious."

"I guess a bird took it to make a nest out of it," offered the driver.

A moment of silence passed, and then...

"Take me to the hotel," Chan told the agent, quietly. "I would like to see my children again." He looked and felt too tired to say anything else.

"Yes, sir," said the junior agent.

* * *

Marcie heard the faint sound of the car leaving the neighborhood, then she reached over to the lump of tattered red ribbon with a quiet chuckle. It was safe again.

With a slow, self-satisfied pull, she uncovered the large glass pieces of the washing machine window.

Carefully, she picked up one of the fragments, studied it closely under a work lamp, then went back to the blackboard, bisected by its vertical chalk line, with one side labeled with her name and her unfinished, synthetic helium notations below it, the other side labeled with PERIL's name and its unfinished equations.

Marcie went over to the PERIL side of the board and jotted down what she had seen on the large shard, humming contentedly to herself.

 


	10. Chapter 10

Winslow Fleach lifted his head from the paperwork that covered his desk upon hearing a knock on his office door.

"Come in," he called out.

The door opened and the imposing figure of Greenman filled the doorway. He stepped inside with a pleasant demeanor and walked up to Winslow's desk.

"Hello again, Mr. Greenman," Winslow greeted him, then wagged his finger at him in an expression of mock-scolding. "I have to say that you are very persistent, but then, so am I. I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in selling park to you. Besides, I have to check on a ride that broke down in the middle of service. I'm just glad that no one was hurt."

Greenman's smile hadn't wavered a bit. "I totally understand, Mr. Fleach. I'm sorry I've been wasting your time and I'll never ask you for your park ever again."

Winslow gave a weary sigh of victory. "Ah, thank you, Mr. Greenman. You know, the sign of a mature person is the way he handles disappointments."

"Well said, Mr. Fleach," said Greenman, calmly. "That's why I'll just sue you instead."

With the dreaded "s-word" heard, Winslow's brain immediately shifted to the defensive. He couldn't understand why Greenman would say that and wished, deeply, that he had only misheard any of it. That this was actually some unexpected section of a strangely lucid dream.

"Wh-What? What are you talking about?" he stammered.

"I'm going to sue you," Winslow's guest continued with unflappable calm. "To oblivion, actually, if you don't relent and sell your park to me."

"Sue me?" Winslow sputtered. "Whatever for?"

"For reckless endangerment of the poor patrons in your shoddy park."

Winslow stood up and became ramrod rigid in the presence of Greenman, he face creased with lines of anger. He didn't care how intimidating the man was, Winslow felt that he would be damned if he was going to let someone say that his park was substandard to his face.

"You're insane. My park is 100 percent safe. It has been for years," he said with steel in his voice.

Possibly because this little man had stood up to him, Greenman gave a broad smile and purred like a courtly tiger before his prey. "Hmm, your earlier words about one of your rides not working and what I brought with me begs to differ.

With that, he reached into his coat jacket, took out a microcassette, and pressed the play button.

From its speaker, Winslow clearly heard Greenman, and then he heard, what seemed to be unreal because he couldn't fathom why, the voice of Marcie.

"Alright, my dear," Greenman's voice calmly instructed her. "Tell me what is the condition of your father's park. Is it worthy of patronage?"

Marcie's voice slurred, "I'm sorry...I...We...have to go."

Greenman's voice chided Marcie with placid patience. "No, no, Marcie. You can't go. Not until you answer my question."

Marcie's voice happily mumbled, "Do you know that Venus and Velma start with a "V"? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"Who are they?" Greenman asked.

"V...she's my...best friend."

Greenman's patiently continued. "Indeed. You should tell me about her sometime, but right now you must tell me about your father's park. Your father's park...

Marcie's muttered, "Wellll...all of my dad's ridesss are sort of...off, y'know? I try to inspect them for problems...squeeky parts, loose fittings...the whole nine yardsss...but I can...only do sooo much. I tell himmm to get an...inssspector, but heee says thaaat there'sss no...need. I'm here."

"He must think of you in high regard to put the lives of so many innocent people in your young hands," said Greenman in a hypnotic voice.

"Yeaaah...young haaandsss..." said Marcie, as consciously as she could. "Rollerrr coasterr..."

Greenman's voice perked up. "What about it? Is it broken down, too?"

"Not rrreally..." Marcie answered. "Rrrails...cheap Chinese steeel...Could spot that..a mmmile awayyyy..."

"Really? Your father cuts a lot of corners, dosn't he?"

"Like a...drunk drriverr...Do you knowww that...my cheapskate dad would tell the food ssstaff to take the...day-old...hotdog buns out of the refridgerator so they can be used again? 'They're only a day old, Marcccie,' he'd tell me. 'They're ssstill good.'"

Then Marcie perked up and said mischievously, "The ssstafff and I would sssing this song behind his...back. Wanna hear it?"

"Not particul-"

Marcie blissfully cut him off, slurring to the tune of "Day-O." "Day old! Dayyy old! Day old buns comin' out of the cold! Day old. Dayy o-"

"That's quite enou-"

"It's six weeks, seven weeks, eight weeks. Dump!"

Greenman turned off the microcassette.

"Of course, I'll give this to my lawyer and the both of us will work on a lawsuit against you. That is, if you're foolish enough to try and challenge me in court," he said, evenly.

Winslow closed his tired eyes and slumped back into his chair, wishing that it would swing him out over a bottomless pit. Falling into nothingness was so welcoming to him now, and he couldn't tell what was tearing him to pieces more, this litigious attack or Marcie's surprising role in it.

"Why?" Winslow asked in a broken voice. "At least tell my why you want my amusement park so much."

Greenman pocketed the microcassette and said smoothly, "Oh, don't trouble yourself with that. The only thing I want to hear from you is the answer to this question. Will you give me your park?"

Winslow lowered his head in defeat. He finally believed that he could tell what it was that made him feel the worst.

Marcie's betrayal.

"Yes..." he said, bitterly.

 


End file.
